From the end (until the beginning)
by Naladot
Summary: "But the Winter Soldier is only a myth. A story traded among little girls with knives in their hands and murder in their hearts. So who was this?" Natasha looks for the Winter Soldier. 2009-present, movie canon.


_Originally posted to AO3 starting 04/06/18._

* * *

\- Arc I -

 _lonely ghosts_

* * *

 _Pochinok, Russia_

 _Date unknown_

At night, he does not sleep. So neither does she.

A single electric bulb hums from its wire snaked across the cabin ceiling. Out this far from Moscow, electricity fluctuates on a system of desperation. The governor has just been pronounced dead, putting the local government in a state of desperation, and so the electricity must be turned on. Soon the bureaucrats will chalk his death up to his incompetency, and promise to replace him with another leader who will implement real reform. As always, better days are ahead for Russia.

"Do you hear the wolves," she asks. Perhaps she has imagined them.

He does not reply.

She gets up and walks the full length of the cabin to the front door, nudges it open, and slips outside. Stars swirl overhead. Wolves call to each other. The trees stand tall and dark. She spots crusted blood on her boot and steps off the porch to wipe it away in the snow.

She intuits that he has followed her outside before she sees him. He moves without sound, a negative space. Tomorrow they will return to the compound, and she will wonder if she only imagined him. But here he is, leaning against the sagging porch railing. Watching her.

Without a gun in his hands, he looks more like a man than a nightmare.

"You should come inside," he tells her.

In the distance, lights twinkle in the city. This grid will be shut off soon, but for the moment, the world feels both safe and quiet. A strange and untrustworthy feeling. She looks at him.

"You don't sleep," she says. "It makes me uncomfortable."

The slightest ghost of a smile twitches across his lips. "Me, too."

She pushes her fists into the pockets of her coat. He is cast in shadow by the glow of electric light pulsing behind him, only a silhouette where a man should be. "Why don't you sleep?" she asks him.

"You don't know."

It's a question and a statement, and neither—something like emotion has flitted through his eyes. She steps closer, her boots crunching in the snow.

"Don't know what?" She tilts her chin up to look at him. A muscle twitches in his jaw and his hair hangs in his eyes. It looks as if it were cut with a knife.

A long moment passes. "Nothing," he says eventually. "Guess I've just gotten enough sleep for one man in my life." Then he turns, and goes inside.

She turns and looks at the moonlight reflected against the snow. She has the strangest feeling, like a mostly-forgotten dream, that this has all happened before.

* * *

 _Odessa, Ukraine_

 _2009_

In the afternoon sunlight the man's silhouette shimmers above the cliffs. Natasha, still bleeding, watches him disappear into summer sky. Behind her the wreck of her car groans, sinking deeper into the sand. She gasps for breath and staunches the blood pulsing from her abdomen with the floral silk scarf she'd thrown carelessly around her neck that morning. Too foolish, too cocky. The engineer is dead. She does not need to look to confirm this is a fact.

But she does, anyway. It is the first thing she must do. She staggers to her knees in the wet sand and confirms the engineer is dead—and thus, she has failed. She brought this nuclear engineer out of Iran, evading dozens of threats on his life, only to fail here, so close to his freedom. With a gentle hand, she closes his eyes, begging him to rest in peace. The sun reflects off the sand and the shattered glass and the puddle of his blood. Natasha must complete her work.

As the ocean paws at her feet, she rearranges the scene. His real passport, his false visa, a few thousand Euros, an impossible escape attempt. For the untrained eye he arrived here alone, and died alone. The ocean is her accomplice, today.

Her scarf flaps against her thigh, heavy with blood. The second thing she must do is disappear. She cannot climb the cliffs, but she must, so she gropes through her bag until she finds a syringe in a single-use packet. A specially formulated serum for soldiers in dire situations—or spies who must vanish. She rips the plastic with her teeth and stabs the needle into her thigh. The pain pulsates so deeply she has to bite her tongue to stop from screaming, but a moment later the pain dulls and she spits blood into the sand. The ocean will wash it away. And she must disappear.

It takes twenty minutes to climb the cliffs. All the while, Natasha calculates the time she has left: she needs to get to the hospital, because she can't stitch up this bullet hole by herself, not if it damaged her organs. Climbing the cliffs might cause irreversible damage, but staying will get her arrested and shipped back to Russia. The only way to go is up.

She reaches the top and staggers over to the mauled-through railing. The scene is eye-catching, dramatic. Someone will call the police, though it may take a few hours. It is a good location for a killing, Natasha thinks. Well-selected.

With a few quick estimations, she finds the spot where the shooter must have stood. There is little to distinguish it save for a few indentations in the weeds. On the beach below, the bullet is still lying beneath the engineer's head. It was a Soviet slug, no markings. She finds the casings—equally bald of markings. A weapon for a ghost.

From there she steals a car out of a rickety barn and drives two hours to Chisinau. She knows a surgeon there who, for a hundred grand, stitches her up without asking questions. The price is fair. Natasha comes down from her adrenaline high to the familiar ache of Death knocking impatiently at her door.

"Not yet," she says to him, watching him retreat to the corner.

 _Not yet,_ says the Winter Soldier as she closes her eyes. _It is not our time yet_.

* * *

The extraction point is in Prague, 48 hours from the time the car went over the cliff. Natasha wakes to the drone of a fan and the sound of whispers in the hall. She brushes her fingers over the gauze on her abdomen, presses hard enough to find the rough outline of stitches. It will hold. The third thing she must do is stay alive.

The nuclear engineer is her first failure since she has come under S.H.I.E.L.D. In two years she has been perfect, unflinching, relentless—and thus far, she is alive. She watches the dim bulbs of fluorescent light flicker in the hall. Fury may punish her. He may not. It may not be his decision. Natasha runs her tongue over her teeth. Deep grooves have formed where she bit down so hard yesterday. 36 hours, she estimates. Contact in 36 hours.

She takes a bottle of painkillers and an unlocked car from the hospital's parking garage, and drives the three hours back to Odessa. Along the way, she forces her thoughts to empty of everything except procedure. Confirm the location, verify the situation. Leave no trail to follow.

She has seen the ghost before. Or she hasn't. The two statements seem equally true and equally impossible; where she grew up, the truth was slippery, anyway. The road blurs in front of her and she slaps her hand, hard, against her thigh. The pain is enough to bring the road back into focus again. She reminds herself to think only of procedure, and focuses on the road.

A half hour outside of Odessa, she finds the place where the chase began. The skid marks left by her tires shine black in the moonlight. Here, she realized someone was pursuing her. Another kilometer. Here, someone shot out her tires. The ghost.

She gets out of the car. The ghost had hunted her until this point, so that her car would go over the cliff. He'd calculated, precisely. She had not.

Natasha walks past fluttering crime scene tape, past the broken railing, up to the edge of the cliff. The car lies in the sand, underbelly exposed. The engineer's body is gone. So is the blood and glass, washed away, as if it never existed.

She locates the spot where the ghost had stood. A small flag marks the patch of weeds; presumably the police have taken the casings as evidence. But a ghost cannot be tracked.

He'd stood here. She saw him from below, saw him raise his rifle, calculate, and shoot. Precise, and absolute.

Natasha stands where he stood and lets the wind tangle her hair.

But the Winter Soldier is only a myth. A story traded among little girls with knives in their hands and murder in their hearts.

So who was this?

* * *

"You're late," Fury tells her.

Natasha enters the house and does not speak. Outside, trees sway quietly in the summer breeze, and the sky is a picturesque blue, punctuated by birds darting from trees to telephone wires. She could get to her car faster than he could reach her, if it came to that. But his car is undoubtedly faster, if there was a chase. Better to find a resolution here, in this room, with her two feet on the ground.

"We saw the police report," he continues, handing her a newspaper. Old school. She's failed so miserably, the director came to do the work himself.

He is bigger than her, and stronger. She'll have milliseconds to land a knife in his good eye before he can shoot her. If it comes to that.

"I left no evidence to indicate my involvement."

"But Dr. Behzad is dead, Natasha."

At the sound of her name, she relaxes her shoulders ever so slightly. He does not plan to kill her. At least she calculated this with some accuracy.

She looks around at the peeling wallpaper, the cabinets full of chinaware coated in dust. This action will appear remorseful, though Natasha does not think what she feels resembles the way people talk about remorse. She only feels tired. She wants a strong sleeping pill in a S.H.I.E.L.D bunker. She wants to forget the ghost.

"What happened?"

Natasha's eyes flick back to Fury. At least she had done this part of her assignment correctly—she'd been too far off the grid for his intel to trace her every step. And the location had been well-chosen for a killing.

"There was an assassin," she says. "Shot out my tires. We went over the cliff. I pulled Dr. Behzad out of the wreck. I was covering Dr. Behzad when the assassin shot him through my abdomen. Dr. Behzad was shot in the head and the assassin was gone by the time I extracted myself."

She lifts her shirt to show Fury the gauze covering the bullet wound. Fluid has seeped through, in the hours it took to arrive here. She will need to take care of that.

Fury stares at the gauze. For a long moment there is only silence and the slant of sunlight through dirty glass.

"Who was the assassin?"

"I don't know."

This is not a lie. Natasha already knows that Fury, who believes in many things, does not believe in ghosts.

"Better than you?"

"Better than me."

Fury sighs. He shows no physical signs of anger, only exhaustion. Natasha forces herself to direct her attention to him instead of counting the seconds it would take to crash through the window and activate Fury's car. The number is too high to be viable, anyway.

"We'll track this assassin later," Fury says finally. He tilts his head. "You look like hell, Natasha."

Natasha blinks. "Well," she says, "I've been worse."

* * *

They leave Prague under the cover of dusk.

Natasha watches the dark silhouettes of trees rush by her window. A ghost says, _you are still too weak, Natalia._

But she is Natasha Romanoff, now. And Natasha Romanoff does not believe in ghosts.

* * *

 _Washington, D.C., United States of America_

 _Three days later_

"Fury's pissed."

Natasha looks up just as Clint leans himself into her doorway. He looks serious, but his eyes betray amusement. Natasha understands Clint by way of her professional skills, and sometimes, their shared experiences are enough to produce real camaraderie. She almost trusts him, more than anyone else. But she doesn't understand why this is funny.

"Well," Natasha says, returning to dismantling the rifle in front of her, "Dr. Behzad was an accomplished scientist who championed innovation to produce a better world. That's what we do here, isn't it?"

"I'm going to ignore your sarcasm. Fury is pissed that _you_ got _shot_ , Natasha."

She doesn't look up from the rifle. It is as close a model to what the ghost had held as she could find in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s repository, not that she could rely on the one glimpse she'd gotten after he'd put a bullet through her. But examining it in detail might give her some kind of clue.

"I took full blame," she offers. "On a fair assessment, I should have anticipated some kind of attack."

"You're still missing my point." Clint steps into her office, which has doubled as her dormitory since she was invited to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. under probationary status. The probation would have been lifted in two months, but Dr. Behzad's death has postponed her evaluation. Natasha's skill set might be an asset, but anyone with her record could not, as Fury had said, "Just submit a resume without going through HR." It took two sessions for Natasha to realize that HR and her extensive psychological evaluations were not, in fact, the same thing.

"What is your point?" Natasha asks, examining the bullets from the rifle. They bear little resemblance to the one she'd left on the beach, but that one had almost been crude, as if the ghost had fashioned them himself.

"That you got hurt, and you didn't have any back up."

Natasha puts down the bullets and looks up at him. Sometimes she forgets—really forgets—that the people here believe themselves to be supportive coworkers, brothers-in-arms in a just war. Her entire childhood she'd been assured that they were monsters. Like most things, it was only a partial truth.

"I didn't need backup," she tells him. She considers her next words. "I never expected the Winter Soldier to crash my party."

It's a new colloquialism that she picked up from Fury a few weeks ago, and that she's been eager to try out. Saddled with lessons in multiple languages from the time she entered her training, Natasha's knowledge of American idioms was woefully dated when she defected and entered S.H.I.E.L.D. When Clint doesn't bat an eye, she files this one away for future use.

He crosses his arm and leans against the clean white wall behind her table. "The Winter Soldier?" His eyebrows lift. "How about that."

She smirks up at him. "You got a better theory?"

"Sure, how about a plausible one?"

"You mean, anything else." She leans back in her chair and mimics his posture, folding her arms against her chest and watching his reaction carefully. "He looked the part though. Never saw him until Dr. Behzad was dead. Metal arm."

Clint doesn't react at all, even to the bit about the metal arm, which she'd expected him to laugh at. His gaze shifts slightly and Natasha follows it to the television on the far wall. Tony Stark is on screen again, pushing past photographers at a press conference. Presumably they are shouting "Iron Man!" but the television is muted.

"You ever see the Winter Soldier before?" Clint asks.

Natasha watches Tony Stark thrust a finger into the air, punctuating a point she can't hear. _Has_ she ever seen the Winter Soldier before? Of course not. She remembers many things, most of them revealed to be untrue by her psychological evaluators and their top-notch S.H.I.E.L.D. technology. But she does not remember him.

"We used to tell stories about him. When I was younger." Her eyes flick over to Clint and she smiles, to make him feel more comfortable. "We used to say that if you were out on your first mission and you couldn't complete your duty, the Winter Soldier would appear and finish the job for you."

She can remember a dozen first kills. She doesn't know which one is real. Some by poison, some with a gun, one with only a knife in her hand. In most of these memories, she is twelve years old. In one, she is ten.

"That's a sick excuse for a fairy tale."

"Well," Natasha says, "We didn't have library hour, you know."

Clint makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a scoff. She knows he is angry, hearing about her childhood, but she can't feel his anger. Her primary psychological evaluator writes on every report that Na _talia Romanova has severely repressed most normal emotions_. Natasha prefers to call this professional competency. But with Clint, she does feel strange sometimes. She hasn't figured out yet who she should be, when she's talking to him.

"But he never did," Clint says eventually. His eyes travel back to meet hers.

"Never did what?"

"Show up."

Natasha thinks about her first murder most likely to be true. A runaway oligarch hiding in France. She killed him with a needle in the neck. The newspapers said it was a heart attack. This, she is sure, is the source of all her repressed emotions—the first time she watched a person's soul disappear because of the work of her hand.

"No," Natasha answers. "He never did."

* * *

 _Pochinok, Russia_

 _Date unknown_

The snow falls lightly at first. She expects a signal on the radio to call them home, but when she clicks it on, there is only static.

He lies on the sunken bed, staring at the ceiling.

She considers him. Today is not the first time she has met him, though she supposed it to be. This realization creeps up on her and her hand pauses on the radio, just before the click that will turn it back on. She supposed today to be their first meeting, but it is not.

The cabin takes on the distorted angles of a dream. She considers him again—his roughly cut hair, the curve under his shirt where his metal arm connects to skin. When has she seen him before? Surely not in the Red Room, where all she ever sees are stern faces and the blood-red eyes of other girls like herself.

If she asks him, will he respond?

The snow falls thickly. She clicks on the radio again, and there is static. She sets it aside.

"Do you know me?" she asks.

His head turns slightly to the side, but otherwise he is still. This, she decides, is what unsettles her—he cannot be manipulated or persuaded, because he does not experience emotions like others do. He seems to experience life one moment at a time, impassive to each change, unaware that there is any joy beyond the brief moment when his target slips from life into death.

In this, perhaps, she and he are not so different.

"You are my partner for this mission," he says after what seems like a long time. The light bulb flickers.

"But we've met before."

"Other missions."

His answer is quick and his voice is thick. Something like emotion, again. He continues to stare at the ceiling.

"I don't remember," she says, very carefully, watching for a reaction. "Why don't I remember?"

His chest lifts and sinks. A deep breath. It means something, but she isn't sure what.

"Perhaps something happened that was detrimental to your work ethic."

She has a hunch that he has just made a joke, but she isn't certain, so she doesn't laugh. She fingers the leather of her jacket and watches him. The light bulb flickers again.

"And you? Do you remember?"

He takes another deep breath. "Very little, Natalia." He frowns at the ceiling. "More than I should."

In one sleek motion he is sitting up, his feet on the floor, and he is looking at her. The change takes her off-guard and she squares herself in the chair. She does not expect a fight because she poses no threat to him, but there is something about the way he is looking at her. Her heartbeat jumps. She forces herself to sit perfectly still.

"Are you going to report me, Natalia?"

The slightest of smiles crooks across his mouth again. Of course she is obliged to report him—the Winter Soldier is efficient and deadly because he carries no attachments to the world. His only objective is to serve the progress of Russia. For him to remember anything beyond the mission at hand is an error in his programming. It is her duty to report this error. She, too, is a servant of progress.

Wind whistles against the walls. She looks at him, and he looks at her.

"No," she says. Her voice is hoarse. "I won't."

She tells herself she is lying, but somehow, she does not believe she will report him.

And in that one breath, her life switches tracks.

* * *

 _tbc_.


End file.
